FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The invention relates to a control for a vehicle transmission (transmission control), through which transmission gears are automatically shifted as a function of at least a driving pedal position and vehicle speed on the basis of shifting performance graphs stored in memory, and through which a load state of the motor vehicle and the driving style of the driver are taken into account.
In one such known transmission control (from German Patent DE 33 41 652 C2, corresponding to U.S. Pat. No. 4,679,145), the transmission gears are shifted automatically as a function of the position of the driving pedal and the vehicle speed or engine rpm, using shifting performance graphs stored in memory. The load state of the motor vehicle, or in other words the vehicle load and the inclination of the roadway, and the individual driving style of the driver are also taken into account. Taking the particular driving situation into account is done by adaptation of performance graphs, or in other words by selecting a performance graph suitable for the particular driving situation, according to which graph the shifting can then be controlled. In order to enable the various variables that affect the performance of the motor vehicle to be taken into account, considerable expense is undergone when using known methods in closed and open-loop control technology.
In other known automatic transmission controls (known from U.S. Pat. No. 4,841,815; Published European Application No. 0 375 155 A1; and an article by H. Takahashi, entitled: A method of Predicting the Driving Environment From the Driver's Operational Inputs, in IFSA '91, Brussels, pp. 203-206), the selection of the particular gear to be shifted is performed by means of controllers operating by the methods of fuzzy logic. With this logic, expert knowledge that has been obtained by experience is written in the form of a so-called rule base and therefore used for the closed or open-loop control processes.